Building the Canon in 1530S Rome: Colocci's Epigrammatari As a Test

Chapter 8 Building the Canon in 1530s Rome: Colocci’s epigrammatari as a Test Case

Nadia Cannata

Angelo Colocci (1474–1549) collected a monumental anthology of neo-Latin epigrams – classical and contemporary – datable to the 1530s, today preserved by an array of manuscripts, mostly housed in the Vatican Library. The work used as its conceptual model Planudes’ Greek anthology, and it sought to es- tablish a ‘definitive’ timeless model by collecting in a Greek format ancient and modern epigrams, in a monolingual Latin anthology. I shall first try and describe the nature of the work I have chosen as a test case for canon building in Renaissance Rome, and then I shall try and contex- tualize it into the framework of the early Renaissance in Rome and its culture which embraced poetry and philology together with the fine arts; and I shall further try to extricate the idea of modernity they spoke for.

1. Colocci’s collection of epigrams, the epigrammatari as they are commonly known, are an unfinished editorial project aimed at collecting around 2500 Latin epigrams of all times. They group poems by major authors, Latin and neo-Latin, as well as by poets whom today we classify as ‘minor’. It draws both on their personal collections and on other minor anthologies, and gathers together pieces which are well known – often even famous and which have often been published critically – alongside more obscure productions, which may have encountered interest, even transitory fame in Rome in the 1540s and 1550s, yet today are all but forgotten. The epigrammatari in their present, unfinished form, exist in two Vatican manuscripts: Vat. Lat. 3352 and Vat. Ott. Lat 2680, (a partial copy of which is preserved in Harvard, ms Houghton Lat. 358). There is a fourth manuscript, preserving an earlier version of the anthology, (Vat. Lat. 3353) and several collections (around 15mss.) which contain poems by various authors which Colocci copied or marked with a view to copying them into the anthology. The two manuscripts carrying the fair copy of the anthology consist of around 450 pages each, and they preserve approximately 2500 poems divided themati- cally into 45 categories arranged in an alphabetical sequence, from Aenigmata to Vitium. They were written by three different hands, Vatican librarii in all

Building the canon in 1530s Rome 147 likelihood, since they appear to have been responsible for several other manuscripts, also belonging to Colocci. The collection includes poems by classical and Late Latin authors (Ausonius, Claudian, Pseudo-Virgil), great Renaissance writers (Poliziano, Bembo, Navagero, Castiglione), and minor Renaissance poets (Tebaldeo, Strozza father and son, Elisio Calenzio, Maddaleni Capodiferro, etc), but it appears very clearly that the two manuscripts were built in such a way as to remain open to further acquisitions of pieces, and corrections were made along the time. Such acquisitions were made from four different types of sources: a) Collections of individual authors such as those by Tebaldeo, Fausto Mad- daleni Capodiferro, Elisio Calenzio, Marcantonio Casanova which he also helped editing; b) Miscellaneous manuscripts from which Colocci selected poems he wanted to include in the collection. He usually penned in the margins of the page the category into which he wanted the epigram to be included; c) Drafts of the epigrammatari; There is one such example, ms Vat. Lat 5640, which is partially a descriptus of the magnum opus, and it contains a digest- ed copy of the anthology, arranged is 30 categories interspersed by numer- ous blank pages. Again, such pages were left to accommodate any further additions d) A fair copy of vol. i of the collection. Housed here in Harvard it contains the sections Aenigmata to Iudicium in a fair copy, as it presents no corrections or additions nor does it have blank pages other than at the end. Its collation with Vat. Lat. 3352 revealed no substantial variant readings. The collection remained unfinished for the very same reasons that call for its publication. In the intentions of its collector, it were to paint a picture, as Casti- glione would have said, of a Paradise lost. Had the Paradise not gone lost, then there would be no need for the book: its unfinished status is therefore part of the very quality of the collection. It appears, therefore, that the work should be interpreted chiefly under two defining keywords: timelessness and universality. Naturally in the equation also came the need to preserve the memory of a poetic practice which was a defining feature of courtly literary circles in Rome and elsewhere during the early Renaissance.

2. Colocci aimed at constituting a modern replica of the Greek Anthology, designed, I believe, to serve mainly the purpose of becoming a model for the epigram as a genre, without making distinctions between ancients and mod- erns, but by embracing in a timeless perspective all examples worthy of be- ing included in a canon. Colocci innovated significantly on his model – not